June 24, 2008 – PART 1 – When the Bank of Japan said, “Show me the money,” they were not speaking in metaphors. Hitachi’s RFID Product Manager explains.

When I think of Hitachi, I remember back to all the great stereo equipment I had first known your company for. What is Hitachi doing in the RFID?

ANDRECHAK: Hitachi is a very diversified company. We got involved in RFID from a Bank of Japan request to our R&D group to come up with an authentication inclusion to go into high value bank notes in Japan. So that is how the Hitachi µ-chip got invented.

For a bank note?! I think of that as paper, correct?

ANDRECHAK: Yes, something to go inside paper.

Did they have a problem to solve or did they come to Hitachi and say, “We have a need for RFID?”

ANDRECHAK: No, they had a need for some kind of authentication inclusion for bank notes. It was something to do with item validation, especially for high value bank notes, so this could be for; anti-counterfeiting purposes. It could be for being able to count the bills in a machine better. But, someway, somehow, to be able to create authentication inclusion to go inside the bank note paper.

So this is not a commercial bank, this is like the Federal Reserve would be here in the U.S.

ANDRECHAK: Yes. What the U.S. Treasury would be to the U.S., this would be the same entity in Japan, which is producing Japan’s paper money.

And where did that go?

ANDRECHAK: It didn’t go to completion just yet; there were some technical issues that still had to be resolved. Number one is the chip.

Although our chip is very small, at .4 mm square, the Mu-chip (µ-chip) is one of the smallest RFID chips on the market, it is still a little bit too thick to be inserted into paper, especially bank note paper, which is relatively thin. If it was card stock, we can work with it as is; but, for bank note paper and the durability requirements of bank notes, the current technology didn’t pass the very high requirements of bank notes in circulation.


Do you see solving the chip size for currency getting to another stage any time soon?

ANDRECHAK: Yes. The issue was the thickness of the chip, not its footprint. The way you get around that is to make a thinner chip. You need to come up with an even smaller chip footprint to support a thinner chip.

You might have seen some press releases and other stories about the Hitachi Smart Chip Dust, which is a very, very small chip. And because it is much smaller in dimension, it can be ground down thinner, so it becomes much thinner than a piece of paper.

When you are talking about a size that thin, then it fits within the paper and you won't have a bump on that paper where it would stick out and be harmed just handling the currency, the way bill get compressed, folded and all of that.

We have heard of RFID theoretically going into paper money in various parts of the world at some point in the future. The clear question many people would have, does that mean that an airport, with lots of people around, that a thief gets to target the person with the most money in their pocket?

ANDRECHAK: Yeah, the design for money would be an extremely near read range. So, the antenna and everything else with it would be designed, at least from what I recall from the original currency application, it was to be near contact, so we are talking about read distance of a millimeter or two.

I will never forget that just before I first heard about RFID a few years ago, that January, Business Week had a cover story about “the technology of the future,” which I have virtually never heard of since, called Smart Dust. Does your chip you are describing relate to anything along the lines of Smart Dust?

ANDRECHAK: I think of dust IC chips as a marketing term more than I think a way of describing something technically. Whenever someone says to me “smart,” I think of something that contains a micro processor or some kind of micro controller. In other words, it can do computational transactions. Think of a smart card, which can have, electronic purse of money on it or some other kind of value stored inside the chip that you can add and subtract from and you can convert from one currency to another currency, all within one micro processor on that smart card.

An RFID tag or an RFID chip is a static device. All it has is some data stored in it. It is not really doing any mathematical or computational work to the ID number it contains.

Mu-chip Dust is the same circuitry that is on the µ-chip currently, just in a much smaller chip package. At the time of its development, 0.4 millimeter square was the smallest size handling equipment that the semi conductor world could work with. But there is a lot of wasted real estate on that 0.4 millimeter square chip.

If you shrink it down a bit more, and remove most of the extra space between the chips on the wafer, you end up with a chip that is much, much smaller—at 0.05 mm square. We call it µ-chip dust or µ-chip powder.